You can see your external workforce. Now what? 

Once you can see your workforce, what do you actually do with it? A senior workforce procurement leader put that to us on a research call and it resonated.

Capacity or capability?

Carolina Bittencourt (UCB) tackles this head-on in “From Visibility to Intelligence” on Day 1. She’ll show how an AI-powered service maturity assessment can classify engagements and expose the gap between buying capacity and buying capability. She’ll also show how to turn that into an operating model finance will back.

SOW: signing is the easy bit

SOW is where a lot of spend still hides. Marcel Bischof (Hitachi Energy) covers locking in clear deliverables and SLAs, folding SOW into your total talent strategy and building the internal skills to govern it properly.

Then Remi Neyrand (Danone) and Ana Daniela Lopez (Avatr) pick up “After The Ink Dries”. They’ll cover what to do when a supplier misses a milestone, how to stop scope creep quietly growing cost and risk, and why live dashboards beat static status reports.

Want to check your own numbers? The Real SOW Test workshop benchmarks your services misclassification rate against real client data. It also runs a live discovery exercise on a sample of your contracts.

Make finance care

Data only matters if it changes a decision. Day 2’s “From Delivery To Influence” keynote panel looks at how procurement becomes a trusted advisor to the board. That includes working with finance when it controls external hiring approvals, without the programme stalling.

Tomasz Wierzbicki (Rolls-Royce) shows how a global labour RFP can look past the headline rate to demand and channel optimisation, including right-sizing seasonal temp labour. The goal is savings the business can actually see; if you want to leave with something on paper, join Stephanie Hericotte (Paysafe) at the Draft Your Business Case roundtable, to benchmark with peers on what is needed to move the needle with stakeholders.

Learn from people who’ve already made the mistakes

Jonathan Shilton (Sanofi) opens Day 2 with “Lessons Learned The Hard Way”. He’ll cover the common traps, how to win back the business’s confidence after a setback, and how to take a programme from version 1 to 2, 3 and 4.

Later that morning, two teams share how they pulled localised, siloed programmes into one global model: dsm-firmenich (Gintare Ferrara and Justyna Bakowska) and The Magnum Ice Cream Company (Alina Spitsyna and Jens Hetem).

Join us on 17–18 March 2027 at Novotel Amsterdam City. Download the agenda to plan your two days, book your place, and bring your hardest question.